Legend of the Seeker | Richard Cypher Shirtless

Craig Horner: The Abbs and the Charms

Craig Horner has got the looks that keep the ladies watching, but he doesn’t take his shirt off much.

Do you get requests for shirtless scenes?, I asked curiously. “I told the writers I don’t want this to be like a Baywatch in the Woods,” Craig replied in an interview about his role as Richard Cypher in the Legend of the Seeker.And yet…

Craig Horner realized his enthusiasm for acting very quickly. “It was cool! I loved it!” he all but gushed. “I didn’t want to do anything else. The first week, yeah, the first day — I was like: ‘I could do this for a living.’” It’s rare to figure out what you really want to do at seventeen, but Craig has never looked back.

I asked him what it’s like, to go from working in a modern setting to a fantasy set where everything has to be made up. “There is something about when you go on a set,” Craig replied thoughtfully. “You look behind and you see stilts. It’s not real. When you’re a kid you go on and you think ‘Oh my god!’ You fill in the blanks with the imagination. Sometimes you lean on a wall and it shakes.” He still does that. He just puts himself into the character and tunes out real life.

But sometimes real life intrudes on the set. They often use plastic swords for much of their work. “One time,” Richard said when I asked him about on-set injuries, “I smacked myself just above my left eye with my real sword. I was trying to give an ‘eye line’ off camera for Bridget and Bruce.” Ouch.

Richard just does what he does best, which is face the challenge that confronts him. – Craig Horner about his character in Legend of the Seeker.[xenite.org]